PHEASANT RAISING IN THE UNITED STATES. 
13 
pheasant and with each other, and the hybrids are perfectly fertile. 
In each case the first effect of the crossing was a decided improvement 
of the stock, due doubtless to the introduction of new blood. As a 
result hybridizing became so popular that now, outside of Norfolk, 
where the original stock has to some extent been retained unmixed, 
pure birds of any one of the three species are rare in England. Other 
crosses also have been made, but only here and there, and without 
the same general intermixture of type as a result.® 
UNITED STATES. 
Efforts to acclimatize pheasants in the United States are of com¬ 
paratively recent origin, though earlier than is popularly supposed. 
More than a hundred years ago, Richard Bache, an Englishman 
who married the only daughter of Benjamin Franklin, imported 
from England both pheasants and partridges, which he liberated on 
his estate in New Jersey, on the Delaware River near where the 
town of Beverly now stands. But although he provided both shelter 
and food for them, the birds had all disappeared by the following 
spring. 
A second attempt was made early in the nineteenth century by 
the owner of a New Jersey estate situated between the Hackensack 
meadows and the Passaic River, opposite Belleville. A park was 
fenced and stocked with deer and English pheasants, but despite 
feeding and careful protection these birds likewise disappeared 
during the winter. 6 
Nearly eighty years ago, a writer in the Turf Register stated that 
Robert Oliver of Harewood, near Baltimore, Md., had for many years 
imported foreign game, including not less than 100 English pheas¬ 
ants. These increased rapidly and were in time turned out, some at 
Hampton, some at Brookland Wood, and a large number at Hare- 
wood. Those liberated at Hampton and Brookland Wood bred, 
and were'occasionally seen afterwards, but those turned out at Hare- 
wood soon disappeared, the last being seen in 1827. In 1829-30, 
Mr. Oliver liberated at his estate at Oaklands, in Anne Arundel 
County, more than 20 pheasants of his own raising. On Mr. Oliver’s 
“Because of this intermingling of species, all pheasants imported as pure stock 
should be examined carefully. Even in English pheasants that appear to be pure bred 
(that is, which have no trace of a white neck ring), the subterminal bar of the ring- 
neck is usually more or less developed on the feathers of the lower back, and the basal 
part of the central tail feathers is rather widely barred with black, instead of showing 
the narrow bar of the pure-blooded English pheasant.—Ogilvie-Grant, Catalogue of 
Birds in the British Museum, XXII, 321, 1893. 
6 Forest and Stream, XXV, 103, Sept. 3, 1885. 
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